Nate Parker Says He Was Wrongly Accused On ’60 Minutes’

CBS has released a clip from Nate Parker’s 60 Minutes interview, airing this Sunday.

“I don’t feel guilty,” he told Anderson Cooper in his first television interview about the 1999 rape case that resurfaced this summer just as buzz surrounding his film The Birth of a Nation was reaching its peak.

Parker also said, according to a press release from the show: “I was falsely accused… I went to court… I was vindicated. I feel terrible that this woman isn’t here… her family had to deal with that, but as I sit here, an apology is – no.”

The filmmaker, who co-wrote, directed and stars in the film about Nat Turner’s slave rebellion, says it would be unfortunate if people avoided the film because of the incident, according to 60 Minutes.

The controversy amplified when it became known that the woman, whom 60 Minutes does not identify, who accused Parker and his former classmate and Birth of a Nation co-writer Jean Celestin of rape committed suicide in 2012.

“I think that Nat Turner, as a hero, what he did in history, is bigger than me. I think it’s bigger than all of us,” Parker said in the interview.

After Cooper asked him whether he thought he did something morally wrong in 1999, Parker said, “As a Christian man… just being in that situation, yeah, sure. I am 36 years old right now… my faith is very important to me… so looking back through that lens… it’s not the lens I had when I was 19 years old.”